One of the more unusual modern airship crashes occurred when a tethered JLENS aerostat became untethered in 2015. The JLENS blimp, designed by Raytheon and TCOM in the late 1990s, was part of an experimental surveillance system, called the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS), that had been developed and tested in several forms, and at several places around the country. In 2015 it was at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, when one of the two unmanned blimps in the system broke free and went on an uncontrolled trip into the sky, and down wind. The 240-foot-long blimp had 6,000 feet of broken tether dangling underneath it, which when it descended, was dragged through fields and across power lines, knocking out power for more than 20,000 people. The blimp eventually was snagged by some trees near Clarkstown, Pennsylvania, more than 100 miles from where it broke free four hours earlier. Before it could get away again in the breeze, state police arrived on the scene and used shotguns to shoot it full of holes, to allow more of the helium to escape. Once sufficiently deflated, military personnel arrived to remove the sensitive equipment, and clean up. The JLENS program was later scrapped by the Pentagon, though other tethered aerostat programs continue to be developed.
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